A database management system (“DBMS”) may be coupled to a variety of storage device types. Although a DBMS may present a logical view of data, the DBMS also uses an underlying physical storage medium to store large amounts of data. Traditional magnetic disk-based storage devices have been commonly used with DBMSs as the physical storage medium. Increasingly, solid-state storage devices, also known as solid-state drives are being used as the physical storage medium. Solid state storage devices offer improved performance and reliability primarily because they eliminate the spinning disks and moving read-write heads of traditional storage devices.
On the other hand, solid-state storage devices have characteristics that may reduce performance when used in conjunction with database management systems. Solid-state storage devices may, for example, comprise a memory organization that is divided into memory pages of relatively small size compared to the logical storage sizes that may be employed by DBMSs. In addition, solid-state storage drives may have different write characteristics than magnetic disks drives. For example, some types of solid-state drives may not allow data to be written directly to memory. Instead, these types of solid-state drives may require data to be written in blocks, and may require that a block first be erased and then rewritten.